


silhouetted by the glow of some place other

by SolaSola



Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: Gen, in a lot of different ways, look sometimes i have a lot of feelings about girls who love knowledge, mentions of blades, mentions of guns, post RtD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 17:38:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18503824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolaSola/pseuds/SolaSola
Summary: “The whole warehouse was dark around them, except for the three women standing there silhouetted by the glow of some place other.” Remember the Dust Chapter 53, “The Last,” by E. Jade LomaxGloria and George and Laney hold a lot of things in their hands. The difference is what they choose to do with them.[character studies of three of my favorite women in L&L]





	1. standing there

George and Gloria and Laney: staring straight into the fire of the Elsewhere, hands gripped tight around worn knapsack straps and hands clutching around the paper wrapping of a care package and hands dusted with chalk. When Laney split the world open, Gloria bounced up and down on her toes a little. Even though she’d wrinkled her button nose when her cohort of porters had been sent up north to chilly mountains or the unpleasantly aromatic coastal fisheries for supplies for Lower Rivertown, even though Laney had scheduled her all over the continent, she still couldn’t help but grin every time that flaring light hit her cheeks. _We break the world under our fingers. It quakes in our wake_. Laney held the walls of the world open, Gloria shifted her package onto one arm and reached back to grab George’s hand in her own, and they went.

The Elsewhere took you apart and whirled you back again like the twisting tendrils of magic that pushed at porters’ seams in the fabric of the world. Gloria could feel Laney, her hard-set eyes and twine knots glowing even amidst the fiery Elsewhere and Bidi’s sticky hands in hers. She could feel George, with dragons carved out of wood and book after book of folklore in libraries Gloria had never seen and hair like spun sugar or maybe gold, and jagged peaks and biting cold driving through the sky and purple—

Laney dropped them right next to the mountain roadside, turning around to start stitching up the rift. Gloria bounded out, shaking orange sparks off her braids.

“Porters,” grumbled George, stumbling after Gloria and Laney’s grace. She resettled her knapsack on her shoulders. Laney dusted chalk off her hands onto the ground next to a now-normal patch of air and glanced quickly up the road back towards the mountains, but Gloria grabbed her hand and started tugging her down the road towards the city.

Gloria made care packages when she'd finished the recommended reading lists that Heather had sent her in the last one. She'd asked Sez (in a quiet moment, when Sez was taking a break) which tailor in Nightmarket she'd recommend for a bathrobe. The box she was carrying was heavy and full of lumpy little parcels wrapped up individually in different-colored paper. She'd labelled them meaning Heather to open them one at a time as needed (the snack pack said "open when you've forgotten to go grocery shopping this week" and the lip gloss said "open when you're missing me" and the books said "open anytime as long as it's not after 2AM") but she really didn't mind at all that they'd probably open all of them that night, together, with the two of them sitting with their legs tangled up on Heather’s bed.

Laney had a list of allies in the vicinity of St. John’s Port. She knew Marian had an attic room ready for George and a cup of tea ready for a chat with Laney about the ongoing trading negotiations. She knew Heather had three extra bedrolls in her closet and a few containers of takeout for a chat on the floor of her apartment and a stack of books from the University she’d be handing off to Laney for the return leg. She knew which stall in the dock market sold good saltwater taffy, and she knew the distance it’d take her to hike upmountain and hitch a ride to an inn that served double duty as a bakery these days. She surveyed her options, and she dusted chalk and ash off her hands, and she raised her eyebrows at Gloria who was settling her heavy box in her arms.

George slid her hands down her knapsack straps, stuck her thumbs in her pockets. “There’s some things I want to keep my eye on up there,” she’d told Jack earlier. She’d meant something else but for now she could feel the raggedy torn edges of a little scrap from the corner of a lab notebook that she’d stuck inside her pants pocket. There was an address on it. She knew where she was going.


	2. Gloria

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gloria loves a lot of different things, and she's never going to be sorry about it.

Gloria could never decide what was in her hands. She’d decided she didn’t want to. Her childhood had been wandering the shelves of her home’s library, brushing fingers over gilded spines and tatty paper pamphlets and funny rocks and shells of river things, pulling things off shelves and flipping through them and then sliding them back onto shelves, wiggling them in between other books, carefully nudging their spines back into line—she could always put them back, if she wanted. She’d had so many things put into her hands, and she never wanted that feeling to stop.

 

* * *

 

Her father handed her elegant weapons, sleek wood and gunmetal, and took her out north of Rivertown for weekends with just the two of them. He steadied her hands, showed her how to stand. He watched, proud, as she leveled her gun and her glare at targets. Her fingers had always been small and she’d loved to feel her father’s big brown hands wrapped over her own small pink ones. When she went to the Academy, the firelight of the stable loft gang’s practice area glinted off Laney’s pistols as it had off her father’s. She wrapped her own hands around other sages’ and mages’ and guides’, stepped back and watched them aim, slapped hands with them in triumph, nudged laney with her elbow until she cracked a smile or sometimes even let out a few words of grudging praise.

When Laney got her badge—or rather, Rupert forged some paperwork and tucked it into a carefully secured pocket of his pack for her and took it up into the mountains—Gloria grinned and cracked her knuckles and raised her chin. Clem got her a pair of guns from the Academy commissary, even though his specialization wasn’t long-range combat. She put them under a pile of notebooks inside her backpack, and when Heads sent baby leagues into the city she opened her eyes wide and pretended to walk close behind Clem and keep her hands tight around her backpack straps. When they got out of the Academy gates Clem threw back his head and laughed at how fast she got them out of her bag and into her hands. She rolled her eyes good-naturedly at him and Red gracefully let her lead them through her lists of goals for the expedition (the notebooks were useful; it was Clem’s, though, that had the important information when the rifts began splitting the air). When Heads stopped sending them, she rolled her eyes behind his back. She stuck a gun into her holster and led Leaf and Red and Weeds and Clem and Jimmy (but only before the rifts started opening) into the city. She’d gotten Jimmy to magic her bullets, and she’d fired again and again into swirling clouds of gold. When Leaf clapped her on her back so hard she almost fell over (Red raised his eyebrows, Clem frowned, and Leaf apologized) she grinned as wide as Jack would and dusted sparks and grime off her hands. “You’re damn right I’m your fearless leader, specs,” she told Clem and Red, and Leaf put on his best puppy dog eyes and asked her why she wasn’t including him in her glorious rule.

 

* * *

 

Her father gave her books: when she was small, in Rivertown’s rainy season, he’d let her carry her picture books into a corner of the library with a mug of hot spice tea while he worked on paperwork at his own desk, if she was careful not to spill tea on the pages or the floor. (When she got to the Academy and Rupert led her on a tour, carrying four separate file folders under his arm, she’d think of her father and paperwork spread out over the entire surface of the table and some on the floor.) At age seven, kicking her feet in her chair at the big dining room table, she’d nibbled her pigtails—there had always been pigtails, her father had taught himself to braid them perfect and symmetrical every morning—and ate breakfast as fast as possible while flipping through the pages of her favorite books, a pile on the table next to her breakfast plate.

Her first year she curled up in her chair at her desk in her dorm room, nibbling on the end of one yellow pigtail as she flipped through her textbook pages, taking notes one-handed. Laney frowned, swiveled around in her own chair, maybe even brought over a mug of a different thick tea for her to cup her hands around. “Maybe you could try holding on to this instead. It’s warm.” Gloria still made tiny braids in the ends of her pigtails as she worked, but when she tucked herself up in her lower bunk she wrapped her hands around the warm ceramic, sipping the thick brew.

 

* * *

 

They handed her a grey armband. She’d checked the “sage” box on her Academy application and sent in an application that required two analytical essays because she loved her father’s library (her library too) and she loved knowing things were organized and teachable and learned. Her father listened attentively from across the dinner table when she rambled about the latest books she’d read, then pointed out a few titles in the library that she might want next. When she was eleven she’d taken a stack of notecards and written out careful descriptions and numbers for all the sections of their library according to a book she’d read. Placards in meticulous eleven-year-old printing informed you that you could find books about Elsewhere theory next to number 113; Bureau law on shelf 340, next to her father’s desk; and breeding pea plants next to a card numbered 576. Her father laughed as she reorganized his library and taped up notecards on his shelves, but he made sure to shelve new books where they belonged. When she was sixteen she sent in an application that included three short-answer responses and two analytical essays, though she’d read over the other pages of the application carefully, the ones edged with blue and red and purple and green. She hadn’t been born with fire pulling at her fingertips and it was the pull of her father’s library that anchored her world.

When she showed up at the Academy gates (a week earlier than it formally opened; locals settled in early) Heads gave her an armband, a grey one, his eyes tired and rather bored as she and her father signed the last of the Academy paperwork. Gloria’s eyes were already wide, taking in the academy gates and the pockmarked stone fountain and the dorms and the lecture halls and the _library_. It was bigger than the one at home and so much more alive, students always camping out inside or bustling in and out or doing homework at a table or in a corner.

Gloria heard whispers—not in the dead-silent library but in the mess hall, around the corner of the tactics lecture hall. She had a test on desert ecology the next day, but she left the other grey armbands in their study carrels and set out for the barn. “If you can teach them, you can teach me,” Gloria said. “Just because I’m smarter than everyone else in a room, doesn’t mean I have to be weaker.”

Gloria didn’t leave her grey colors behind. When she and Laney took the study group out into the clearings at the edge of the grounds (Laney circled their groups with glowing wards, and Gloria set up targets, counting the paces from the firing line and making measurements) she looked into the faces of other sages. She talked about adrenaline release and counting your shots to fall in between heartbeats and bracing for the kick as the total system of bullet and gun retained zero momentum. She decided some days were for dragging herself out of libraries and into dark alleys, and some days she’d do the opposite. Sometimes you can’t take the library out of the sage.

Laney moved out and Gloria met her new roommate, a fairly surly first-year mage major. Gloria put her pillow in her backpack and camped out in Heather’s room, where sleepover conversations produced bibliographies and recommended reading lists. Gloria knew more about pea plants by the end of one particularly chatty session than was probably written in the Academy library. She aced her ecology test that week. When Leaf said that being a guide wasn’t about ducking and running, that it was about protecting people, Gloria knew what he meant. And she would have said, _being a sage isn’t about knowing. It’s about sharing and using_.

 

* * *

 

Gloria decided she was okay with what got put into her hands. She took what she loved and held it tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dewey decimal numbers in Gloria's library are fairly accurate, as are her biology and physics with regards to firing a gun.
> 
> Woooo my first ever fic! Still planning on Laney's and George's sections.
> 
> Find me on tumblr @thats-the-moon-grey


	3. George

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> George has never stopped running from what she's been given.

George would never suggest that anyone got to choose what they got handed. She had been running from her village for most of her life but she had decided, before she ran, that she would take what they had handed her and see it through.

* * *

 

They gave her a knife. They didn’t give her a boar spear, precisely, but George figured it was a logical extension. She wasn’t about to aim at a dragon with something so small she could fit the sheath up her sleeve. She always thought of the spear as borrowed.

George had meant to be a sacrifice. She had never stopped running from that. They gave her a knife, and they left a shovel in the ashes of a town where even the toy trains crumbled to ash in her hands. They left her a dragon. And George didn’t leave. She hid and she found fish and fruit in mountain streams cold enough to leave her hands numb when she reached in to flip the fish out. She stayed and she stopped believing and she started thinking about blind spots and smoke on the horizon and dragon song.

She left behind a mound of dirt grown over with white flowers and kept the spear.

“I’m going to the university in St. John’s Port,” George said. “I was hoping I could leave the spear with you. Where Bidi won’t get at it, I mean.” She reached for the loop that holstered the boar spear to her belt, swallowed, had to look at it for her fingers to find the buckle, swallowed again. She shifted her hand to its shaft just for a place to hang on to it.

Bea took her hand and slowly peeled her fingers away from the spear, drew the spear for her, and put the spear on the counter and pushed a cup of tea at George to wrap her fingers around instead.

It took days. George stayed a week at the bakery before heading south. She spent the days teaching Bidi math and shingling the roof. She spent the evenings having Bea take the boar spear out of her hands and put it on the kitchen counter and then pulling George over to the kitchen table with a cup of tea. She kept moving her hand to where she expected her spear to be, to go for a sharpening stone or a polishing cloth. Bea gave her a belt knife in a leather sheath with a clasp. More often than not, George found her fingers scrabbling over the brass clasp, latching and unlatching it for lack of something to do. It was—better.  

When George left she helped Bea lock the spear in the cabinet Jack built. When George left Bea didn’t give her a cup of tea, but she gave her a knife and handed her her pack. When George left she had a big hug for Bidi, picking her up off the ground and spinning her around. She had a quieter hug for Bea, tucking her face into Bea’s shoulder.

When George left, she brushed her fingers over the knife sheath on her belt and found it latched firmly shut. She found herself smiling.

Her knife carves dragons and fibonacci spirals into the wood of a university table in the back of a study room. The dragon’s mouth is open, swallowing some previous student’s “you deserve a hot cocoa” in blue-black ink on the tabletop. George is annoyed that her fingers keep going to her knife but she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t happy.

* * *

 

They gave George a name. If George ever thought this sentence to herself she wouldn’t have been able to tell you what the antecedent of “they” was, although she’d be able to deliver semi-fluent commentary on the use of indefinite they in folklore courtesy of an interesting discussion with Rupert in the Rivertown library one day.

Somebody had named her George, sometime between an uncertain “It’s a—boy,” and handing the baby off to some assistant and a mother being lowered into a patch of graveyard ground next to her husband. George couldn’t have told you who chose her name, or why, and it wasn’t the most important part of her. On the road between mountain towns, a just-christened boar spear on her back and the dust of shovelled dirt still under her fingernails, though, she turned her name over and over in her mouth for the first time. When she introduced herself at the first inn on her trip, it was with “You can call me George” and a handshake she practiced to keep firm. Years in, the name would be quieter, the handshakes turning into quicker, surer things she shared with the people at the tables and not just the owner.

A town would add “Saint” and “Dragon Slayer” to her name by popular vote and George would look at the ground and not quite frown. On their way out of the inn and to the bakery, though Jack would look up at her and nudge her shoulder, though, and her face had to split into a smile and she shot back, “Guess I needed a title even longer than yours if I’m running with the _Giantkiller._ ”

“Who ever thought you should be called _Saint_ , have they even met you.”

“Why am I the Pied Piper, I barely even pipe, I _sing_ ,” Liam would add.

“Look, watch out before you start demanding accuracy in your vigilante names, because sometimes they’re just going to slap you with _The Baker_ and honestly,” Bea would grin, bumping into George with her hip and poking Liam’s shoulder with a finger.

She laughed with her friends, that night, trading jabs. She’d feel the same grin on her face when a bartender in an inn reminded Laney, “As in _Saint_ George the Dragon Slayer” and George climbed over the bench to get a towel in the face. Everyone who was important knew who George was. She’d leave the Saint and the Slayer to rows and rows of books of varying accuracy in folklore sections of libraries.

She doesn’t think of Ana as being given. She thinks of Bea giving her forged identification as a goodbye gift, remembers nights in an offcampus apartment curling her hands around her ID card and shaking, running _Jones_ over her tongue. It’s not that George doesn’t think about Ana Jones, but she’s learned to shake it off and move on.

Jill would ask her, under an unfamiliar sky with Rupert asleep on the other side of the fire, what George thought of her name. If it meant anything. If she’d chosen it. Jill told George about trying out names with Annie-Bell between customers, sitting on a stool in the dock market and going down a list written out on graph paper, tossing names back and forth and crossing off things when they didn’t fit quite right. “We ran three trials of each,” Jill said, smiling ruefully and invisibly in the firelight. “Just to make sure the data wasn’t skewed.” Instead, George told Jill about _UMPHT_ and Shield, about saying “I want to meet dragons,” and hiking up-mountain with her friends, through volcanic ash fields, about being named by beings with air-shaking whistles and millennia of memories.

“It’s not like it wasn’t a choice, to keep George,” George said. “But no one ever gave it to me intending it for _me_. And then they tried Slayer and I like that so much less. George is fine.”

Jill made a _mm-hmm_ noise and asked about dragon whistles, about what it felt like to see sound shaking the dust in the road and to feel magic in your bones, about a language made up of images and colors would be like, structurally. George told her about dragons who smelled blood and swooped down out of the air, about the deadly beauty in eyes that seemed to hold the universe.

She thought about her blood on Jack’s hands while Liam held up his hands and closed his eyes and whistled magic to the dragons. She thought about years later, waiting in a hallway and crossing her arms, eyes flicking down to fingernails scrubbed of every speck of dirt. She thought of Bidi translating Jack’s name as “red hand boy” and Jack saying, “I’m a lot of things” and meaning something else that neither of them was about to say. She knows, she understands, about Jack and names and Jack thudding his forehead into her curls. But she tells Jill, “I’ve been a lot of things, but. George has always been fine.” She shakes her head to clear it a little and she really is.

* * *

George has held the weight of her world, her village, on her shoulders. She thinks almost every day of the ache and the blisters from shoveling mountains of dirt over mountains of ash. She knows what she has been given. She knows she is letting go.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> APs are over and I'm finally updating! I really hope George is accurate—she's such a poignant character it was hard for me to put words to her. Do fibonacci spirals exist in a world without Fibonacci?


End file.
